'Torrenting' & Ratio

[Aristocles]

I am putting this here because it is really about 'torrenting'.

I think most here agree that at some sites, ratio is not so easy to maintain.

I was, unfortunately, arguing with a guy on a tracker forum about using the seedbox to keep ratio and buffer high. It is a fairly large tracker; but it's a niche tracker with small swarms- often very few to no REAL leechers (there are some of the "partial seeders" who get counted as leechers). I told the guy that in my experience the seedbox was not a great aid over the client & pc route, with places such the one in question. Some, but not vastly. He shot back about the glories using of a seedbox on the tracker and acted as if I needed advice. . .

Shortly I find out that we both have ratios of < 2:1 and his is slightly higher than mine. Then I see his upload amount is very significantly higher than mine. He has done this in four weeks. So, I conclude that the guy has done something that most 'torrenters' find not viable, to wit, he has used the seedbox (with 125GB allowable space) to download only stuff from that tracker, and has milked each torrent as much as possible in a short time shitcanned it. Most all people 'torrenting' use more than one tracker and indeed have a multiplicity of interests, no? Isn't the practiced mentioned, odd?

I told him that with time and a client/pc setup and no real interest in getting things for myself (usually leecher-less) I could accomplish the same.

Am I missing something here, guys?

[ca_aok]

Sounds like he's RSSing/autodownloading each new release in an attempt to build a lot of buffer fast. Plenty of people do this, perhaps you just haven't seen it before.

As for having a multiplicity of interests, he can worry about those when he has some free space on his box, or use his home connection for those.

[IdolEyes787]

Seedboxes are to a large extent people's response to the incongruities between upload speeds of various countries/IPS.
Unfortunately with no leadership shown by most trackers it is has become like an escalating arms race where the proponents feel they have ample justification ,there are no real winners and the poorest are the ones who suffer most.

The sad fact is since for most people seedboxes are a non-sustainable ( and limited) resource so the normal course is over-seed build as big a buffer as possible( which usually requires dumping of files) in the time allowable and" live " of it for as long as possible .
At least that is the way I see things .

I wish more sites would show a bit of courage/vision like BCG ,iTS and FSC and reward long-term seeding( something a person can control) as much as speed ( something a person can't).

[Aristocles]

Thanks, guys.

[Roark]

Seedboxes are to a large extent people's response to the incongruities between upload speeds of various countries/IPS.
Unfortunately with no leadership shown by most trackers it is has become like an escalating arms race where the proponents feel they have ample justification ,there are no real winners and the poorest are the ones who suffer most.

The sad fact is since for most people seedboxes are a non-sustainable ( and limited) resource so the normal course is over-seed build as big a buffer as possible( which usually requires dumping of files) in the time allowable and" live " of it for as long as possible .
At least that is the way I see things .

I wish more sites would show a bit of courage/vision like BCG ,iTS and FSC and reward long-term seeding( something a person can control) as much as speed ( something a person can't).

People can control speed, they can buy a seedbox. Sites, on the other hand, have a much harder time tracking how long someone is seeding with any accuracy - there's nothing stopping someone from limiting their upload to 0 for example. As a result, the sites with the most ratio pressure generally have the best retention.

The winners are everyone in the swarm who get to download more content at higher speeds. As for the losers, well, with millions of people in the world starving, I can't say I'm all that concerned about the people, including myself, who can'/won't afford a server.

[stoi]

Well we dont really reward anything at the moment, because we dont have classes (well promotion demotions based on ratios or Average seed time anyway).

I do believe there is a place for seedoxes on trackers, but it will come to a point, where there are that many seedoxes, even the seedoxes struggle to get a ratio on these sites (it may take awhile, but it will get there eventually).

We are discussing this on BCG actually, in the latest tracker poll forum topic, and like I said in there, there is nothing wrong with seedboxes, on BCG ecause we have the seed point system, to negate the effects of them. IE if you just seed what you download, we give you the damned ratio, and you will never get banned.

As for retention, I cant quite agree, I know you said generally, but our oldest torrent is from 17 December 2006 and it still has 33 seeders on it, Oviously others die after a couple of months, but thats the same with most trackers, unless they only allow good stuff and only 0 day to be uploaded.

IE: if someone uploads AC2 360 it will last awhile, if someone uploads NBA 1997 for the PS1 it may not even get 1 snatch, never mind last a couple of months.

[soulreaper]

Seedboxes are to a large extent people's response to the incongruities between upload speeds of various countries/IPS.
Unfortunately with no leadership shown by most trackers it is has become like an escalating arms race where the proponents feel they have ample justification ,there are no real winners and the poorest are the ones who suffer most.

The sad fact is since for most people seedboxes are a non-sustainable ( and limited) resource so the normal course is over-seed build as big a buffer as possible( which usually requires dumping of files) in the time allowable and" live " of it for as long as possible .
At least that is the way I see things .

I wish more sites would show a bit of courage/vision like BCG ,iTS and FSC and reward long-term seeding( something a person can control) as much as speed ( something a person can't).

Nicely put. "Control" is the key word here.

[Di@monds]

In the end its about who is seeding, 30 seeders and you cant get more than 50kt/s or 1 seeder with fast connection/sb

[PancakeWaffles]

In the end its about who is seeding, 30 seeders and you cant get more than 50kt/s or 1 seeder with fast connection/sb

killotons?

[Disme]

Hmmm ... I don't know why so many people always complain about the ratio-system.

It's not that hard to maintain a decent ratio. I've been torrenting for a very long time now, and have been, and still am on a ton of trackers and I still have to see the first tracker where I couldn't maintain my ratio.

I have never had to use a seedbox to buffer my accounts. I just let things seed for ages with my home connection.

Off course I only download what I will be using or watching. There's no point in downloading something you know upfront you won't use. Seems rather pointless to me.

I can understand that there are people with a real shitty home-connection, that can never maintain a decent ratio, no matter how long they keep seeding a torrent, but than I would start using another filesharing method to get my files.

God knows there's plenty of different ways to get your files that don't have a ratio-system.

Many people are in favour of trackers without ratio's, but it happens frequently on ratioless trackers that I have downloadspeeds of 0,5-1 KB/s because of people that cap their upload, because that way they can seed for the required timespan, without actually uploading more than 5 MB or so.